


Umbra, Penumbra

by end_alls



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, spooky scary ventus, terra and aqua briefly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22110817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/end_alls/pseuds/end_alls
Summary: Roleswap where Vanitas is the one raised with care and compassion in the Land of Departure, and Ventus... is not
Comments: 59
Kudos: 279





	1. Light

Vanitas sat on top of his bed, having all but given up on sleep. He’d spent the day meditating with Terra and Aqua, learning to still the storm of emotion inside him, but so many hours of calming his mind tended to leave it racing once night had fallen.

He always felt more awake at night, when the darkness in the world stirred the darkness that made up his heart. The Unversed were the same—growing more alert once the sun went down. The Floods that had spent the day sleeping around the castle grounds roved his bedroom floor or curled at the foot of his bed, watching him intently.

Vanitas flopped back onto his sheets, and put a pillow over his face. He’d gotten used to their stares, but that didn’t mean he never longed for the day when this could all be over.

From what the others had told him, after a training accident had stripped his heart of its light, a Master called Xehanort had brought him here, to this quiet and isolated world, so that Eraqus, a true Master of light, might mend him.

The process had been a difficult one. Without light to match his shadow, any emotion he formed would spill from his heart in the form of Unversed—dark creatures twined with the darkness of his heart. Master Eraqus and the others couldn’t harm them, or else risk bringing the same pain upon Vanitas, so the Unversed were instead contained, controlled, until they could be coaxed back into his heart.

He could hold more now than he could then, feel smaller things without fear of spilling over, but every outburst across these past few years—and there had been several—manifested as a reminder of how far he still needed to go until his heart could house the light Master Eraqus wanted so badly of it.

So Vanitas continued to try, did all he could to follow the teachings of light, so that one day, his Master could watch on proudly as the final Unversed dissipated at last into nothingness. For in spite of all the freedoms he had, all the care and attention being given to his rehabilitation, all the things he’d come to learn about the worlds beyond his own, he’d never been allowed to leave.

Two of the largest Unversed, the biggest remaining monuments to his brokenness, had been trained into sentinels, keeping watch over the grounds day and night. Each time they passed below his window, Vanitas imagined the retreating sound of their footsteps as their massive forms growing lighter with every step, until they too could be accepted back into his mending heart.

After the next sentinel passed, Vanitas pulled the pillow from his face, and turned his eyes to the stars outside. Each one held a world of its own, waiting to accept him into its light once he’d proven he deserved it.

Just as he turned away from the window, there was a brief flash of light outside. Vanitas looked back to scan the skies, letting out a sigh at having missed the shooting star.

Suddenly, the Floods in his room began to twitch, ears pricking and necks swiveling, and Vanitas had time to wonder why just before the pain hit his chest.

It was worse than anything he’d felt in years, and it pressed his thoughts back into days he’d done his best to forget.

At once he was pinned to his bed, chest lit with hot, searing white, like one of Aqua’s metalworking tools. The pressure was too intense for him to even scream, and between haggard breaths, Vanitas strained his ears to listen for the approaching footsteps of the patrol, but none came.

He closed his eyes, calling on his training to will his body back to stillness, but the pain churned inside his ribs, boiling and putrid, until he couldn’t contain it any longer. His skin went clammy on top of his sheets, and suddenly darkness was pouring from atop his chest like blood, spilling over his bed and onto the floor where it pooled into a dark mass of pitch.

Vanitas scrambled back, freed at last from its pressing weight, but it was too late for the Floods. It had absorbed them into its form, and began to rise before him as he backed against his bed frame.

His keyblade flashed to his hand, and he summoned what energy he had to freeze the thing solid, as he’d been taught to do every time he created an Unversed. He’d grown used enough to the way the ice numbed the phantom pain, but this time he could feel the way the mass still swirled beneath the surface of the ice.

He had to leave. He had to get Terra and Aqua to help him.

Before he could get up, there was a crack of splintering wood beside him.

The latch of his window had been broken, and one side now hung askew, nearly ripped from its hinges. In the next moment, it was all but erased in a flash of white as something appeared on the sill.

It was an inverted silhouette, rendered in white, like a piece of reality had been cut from its seams.

“Did you feel that…” A voice came from the person-shaped thing in a drained whisper, like the speaker’s throat was parched dry. “…Vanitas?”

The next thing he knew, the frozen Unversed was being shattered by the figure’s backhanded keyblade, and Vanitas’ chest was igniting with renewed pain. He doubled over, at last letting out a choked gasp.

“I didn’t.” The figure turned its turned its smooth head—was it a helmet?—towards him.

The sound of the ice had to have woken Terra or Aqua by now. They’d have to come.

But as if the thing had read his thoughts, all at once his shirt was balled in its fists and a high-pitched screech ground through his bones, lighting the world up with white as it shifted the two of them through space—down onto the departure platform.

As the figure held him suspended, he caught his own face reflected in its glossy helmet, distorted with confusion and terror.

Vanitas had grown well accustomed to the sensations each emotion brought on—heat for anger, weightlessness for joy. This ice running through his veins, locking his muscles, was rarer than the others.

This was fear.

An Unversed slid from inside him like a lens brought out of focus, and his captor’s neck swiveled to follow it. Vanitas, no longer burdened by fear, quickly summoned his keyblade and bashed it across the white figure’s head.

It dropped him, but otherwise didn’t flinch. Its head simply turned to face him slowly, and spoke again. “He said I wasn’t ready. That I needed to wait.” The figure’s keyblade sparked into its hand once more. Vanitas could see now in the moonlight that it was like polished glass—all sharp edges glinting even in the low light. And all it took was one backhanded throw, and the Unversed Vanitas had just created was shredded to ribbons.

Vanitas fell to his hands and knees, pain blooming across his skin.

“But I knew I could find you, shorn shard of my soul.”

He was having trouble making out the soft-spoken words. Even when they sparred, Master Eraqus had never permitted Terra or Aqua to strike him, lest they risk creating the very creatures they were trying to rid their world of—rid him of. Vanitas was unaccustomed to the magnitude of this new pain.

The bleached figure took a step toward him, casting light instead of shadow across Vanitas’ curled form. His fear was rising again, and he did his best to still himself. It was easy enough to guess what would happen if he let out another Unversed.

“Who are you?” Vanitas finally managed, raising his gaze to where he imagined the figure’s eyes must be.

For a moment, he thought it wouldn’t answer, but then its chin tilted down to appraise him. “I am nothing,” it answered in a raspy whisper. “I am the sands worn smooth by wind.” An inhale, like speaking was growing difficult. Or tiresome. “Ventus.”

“What do you _want?”_ As Vanitas spoke, the sound of the sentinel’s thudding footsteps finally rose above the hammering heartbeat in his ears. No.

The figure—Ventus—flung his keyblade in a cruel strike raid that shredded into the sentinel’s chest, felling it and Vanitas both.

A scream ripped itself from Vanitas’ throat as Ventus drove the keyblade into the Unversed again, slashing through its remaining armor until it had been rended apart. Vanitas gasped for air as the Unversed dissipated, pleading with his own chest to end its cycle of creation, but it wasn’t listening. Somewhere beyond the blinding white hot, his body was going cold and damp again, readying itself to expel the pain it wasn’t built to contain.

As he laid curled on his side, the thing called Ventus returned, and leaned in close enough for Vanitas to hear the starved breath beneath its helmet. “I want to feel.”

Darkness poured from Vanitas’ chest, and as it did, Ventus shoved him onto his back, pressing its hands into his chest as if it might tear the coming Unversed out itself. The darkness spread across its pristine gloves as it held them there, but instead of staining them, the black only sloughed off like oil on water. Vanitas heard the thing let out something like a hiss as it clutched at him tighter.

“Van!” Terra yelled from the direction of the castle.

“Van!” Aqua joined, casting a bolt of ice from her keyblade.

The ice caught Ventus across the jaw, right before its head whipped around back to her.

“Get away from him!” Her next blast of ice hit it in the chest this time, strong enough to knock it back off of Vanitas.

The relief through his veins was enough to slow the flow of darkness from his chest, and Vanitas rolled onto his hands and knees, regaining his balance enough to call back his keyblade.

Once Terra had made it in range, he joined Aqua’s efforts to subdue the attacker, casting some ice of his own, even though his aptitude for magic was far behind his physical abilities.

Vanitas realized they were trying to contain Ventus, like it was an Unversed—as if this monstrous thing could have come from him.

The ice magic did nothing to slow it as it resumed its advance toward Vanitas and resummoned its keyblade.

This gave Terra and Aqua pause. No Unversed had ever summoned a keyblade, especially not one so different from his own.

“Vanitas, did you—make this?” Terra called.

“No—no!” he pleaded. “I don’t know where it came from!”

Vanitas barely reacted fast enough to block a vicious blow from Ventus’ blade. “Emotion has made your heart a liar,” it hissed, too low for the others to hear.

Flame lit the air as Aqua’s fire magic struck its back. Terra used the opening to knock it to the ground with his blunt keyblade. For a moment Ventus only laid there, then traced shaking fingers along a newly formed crack in its helmet.

Terra and Aqua stepped between the two of them, sheltering Vanitas from harm as they always had.

“What do you want with Van?” Aqua brandished her keyblade at its chest, and Terra joined her.

“I want.” As it raised itself to its elbows, a shard of its helmet fell away. “To feel.”

Beneath the fogged white glass of the helmet laid a bleak grey eye, slightly obscured by a fringe of white hair, and set in gaunt skin that had been bleached pale by light without end.

As their eyes locked, something unlike fear, but almost like pain, slipped from Vanitas’ eye, dropping onto the ground to take shape as an Unversed the size of a mouse.

It crossed between Terra and Aqua as a shadow, towards Ventus, and as it rose to reform itself, Ventus snatched it, clutching the small thing to his chest like a starved person would a dropped morsel.

Vanitas held Ventus’ eye, trying to breach its ice, but there was nothing to be found reflected in it except himself.

At last, it broke away, tracing a line up the two keyblades drawing closer to Ventus’ chest. The eye met their faces with a stare colder than any ice that had been summoned tonight, just before it drifted closed in focus.

A flash of light lit the sky of the Land of Departure, and Terra and Aqua stumbled back, blinded.

“No!”

When their eyes at last recovered, they focused to find that Ventus had vanished, leaving nothing but a chalky scorch mark on the cobblestone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...good evening
> 
> Sort of a look into what Vanitas' recovery might have looked like if he'd been brought to the land of departure. Even though it would have been nice with Terra and Aqua's support, I think Eraqus would have instilled a lot of doubt and fear about the darkness in him, stalling the process of his recovery longer than necessary.
> 
> As for Ventus, I like the idea that this emotion-starved Ventus is harder for Xehanort to keep on a leash because he doesn't have pain or feelings to control and manipulate, so he tends to do stuff like.. this
> 
> I'm on twitter at [toppiegames!](https://twitter.com/toppiegames)
> 
> edit: THERE IS FANART NOW....  
> [Art by kipskiff](https://twitter.com/kipskiff/status/1213609232068513792)  
> [And then some by me!](https://twitter.com/toppiegames/status/1303210888640360448)


	2. Pity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for brief inferred abuse by xehanort

Ventus crossed the threshold of his bedroom—a dilapidated stone room of some long-abandoned castle, only made worthy of being called a “bedroom” by virtue of the fact that there was a bed in it. The bars on the window told a different story, spoke of days when it might have been a cell.

Xehanort had given him this—this cold, broken hovel—and called it fitting for a cold, broken heart.

The Unversed let out a pained squeak, and Ventus’ attention returned to the creature still clutched in his hand. He loosened his grip.

The sun had set, but the moonlight streaking onto the floor and the dull pallor he always cast were light enough. Against the washed-out grays and whites of the room—for darkness could never survive around him—in his hand, the small creature looked like a hole in the world.

The Unversed tilted its head, beady eyes boring into his own through the gaping crack in his helmet.

He had no way to mend it.

Without asking Xehanort.

Ventus would rather return to the Land of Departure, and let Vanitas’ friends try to break him. Strangers would be clumsier.

The Unversed struggled again.

He needed to contain it.

Keeping his grip firm on the creature, Ventus used his other hand to arrange four stacks of books, pulled from piles in the corner. He had no need for them now. Having memorized their contents, the books had been left to fade, their dark letters slowly sinking back into the white pages like ruins lost in sand. It was the fate of everything that was near him for too long.

Ventus placed the Unversed in the center of the stacks, enclosed by four weighty walls of paper. He set a final book on top of the hole, trapping the thing in a miraculous box of darkness, in this room that had none left to give.

As Ventus waited to see if it would try to escape, the broken vision through his cracked helmet became cumbersome. He latched his fingers around the bottom and wrenched it off, heedless of the exposed glass edges. It landed on his bed, rolling to a stop upright to stare at him through its gaping skull.

At last, the Unversed let out a loud trill, and Ventus tuned his attention to the sound of its little feet clawing at the edges of the paper.

Then, a thought came. Seemingly from nowhere.

Did it need to breathe?

Ventus crouched before the stack again, and shifted the top book to reveal a triangle-shaped hole in the small cell he’d made for the Unversed.

The small cell.

Ventus rose. Without the mask, it was easier to see the room for what it was.

Before his mind could wander much further, he heard the approach of footsteps, slowing to a stop outside his door.

“Ventus. Come.”

Some day, he wouldn’t.

Today, he did.

He returned from Xehanort with a dripping nose. It could hardly be called a nosebleed, for the ashen liquid leaking from his face had lost its pigment a long time ago.

He didn’t do anything to stem the flow. It would stop eventually, like it always did, and he would feel no different.

As his eyes fell to his hands, he discovered that his finger was bleeding too. There was a cut he must have gotten removing his helmet, yet not noticed until now. It wasn’t deep, but depth had never mattered.

No wound, no sensation, could reach him within this shell.

The blood came out sluggishly, as if it couldn’t be bothered to leave his poisoned veins.

He did not understand how he was alive.

What this “life” was.

But with the Unversed—the scrap stolen from Vanitas, who had everything—he would find out.

Ventus removed the book from the top of the stack.

There was nothing inside.

He shoved the books away, upending the piles and flinging them across the room. His mind ran. There were so many holes and cracks in the walls—it could be anywhere. Anywhere.

A chirp.

Ventus’ head spun towards the sound.

It had come from his bed.

He rose to his feet, dropping the book in his hand with a loud _thump,_ and stepped towards the bed, ready to fling the ragged sheets from it, send the helmet crashing against the wall. It would be better off broken beyond repair anyway.

But as his hand reached for the sheet’s tattered edge, a tiny dark shadow poked its head from the hole in his helmet.

Ventus stilled.

The Unversed crept from the gaping crack, ears pricked for sound as it approached the edge of the bed.

Ventus drifted closer, falling like snow to his knees. As he came to rest beside the bed, it trilled a warning at him, taking a few cautious steps backwards towards the helmet.

He could grab it again, squeeze it tight between his fingers until it gave up whatever tiny emotion it held inside, gave it to _him,_ but his sluggish body wouldn’t listen to the clarity inside his head.

Ventus’ hands raised, proffered to the Unversed as if it were an object of prayer.

It stopped its retreat to flick its head towards the hands that had caught it, trapped it. Stolen it from home.

Ventus didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t breathe as he watched it twitch in deliberation. And as he stared, the want to capture it fell away in the wake of a new thought—an old thought, old as he could remember.

_I want to feel._

Vanitas had been excused from training after the events of the night, and put on immediate bedrest, which really meant not being allowed to leave his room, with nothing to do but read or study. Eraqus did this every time he messed up, as if locking him in his room alone would do anything to improve his mood.

Without the sentinels, it was Terra and Aqua’s footsteps that now passed beneath his window, at regular intervals. Vanitas’ chest soured with the guilt of taking them away from their own studies, but it would take nothing short of a meltdown to replace the two sentinels that Ventus had slain.

Ventus.

In the hours since he’d vanished, Vanitas had felt a phantom tightening in his chest, an uncomfortable squeezing that had made it impossible to get comfortable. But there had been no burst, no flash of pain.

Ventus hadn’t killed the Unversed yet.

Vanitas sat up to look out his window. Eraqus was on the platform below, crouched near the bleached mark on the stones that Ventus had left, back turned on the castle. He must still be trying to trace the pathway of light to find out where Ventus had disappeared to.

“Ah—!” Vanitas’ chest suddenly tightened, and for a moment, he couldn’t breathe. Then the grip relaxed.

His eyes flicked back down to Eraqus.

Vanitas waited to see if he wanted to tell his master about this.

He didn’t.

As if in response, the squeezing loosened. Then, it shifted into a generalized anxiety—a fluttering heartbeat and the feeling of being trapped. Though that last part might have just been brought on by the fact that he had been all but trapped in his room.

Vanitas set the book he’d been trying, and failing, to read on the windowsill.

Ventus hadn’t killed the Unversed yet.

_I want to feel._

That was what he’d said. _He._ Ventus wasn’t an _it._ The eye he’d seen hadn’t been a monster’s. It had been a person’s. A person who had had everything taken from them—even their darkness burned away.

So he’d stolen Vanitas’ darkness, to try and make it his own.

And Vanitas felt sorry for him.

The Unversed appraised Ventus’ wounded finger, head tilting quizzically as it skittered a few steps closer. Then a few more. It paused, just before it brushed his skin, snout tracing around the grey blood as if smelling it. Ventus had come to assume he had no scent, but with no sense of smell, it was impossible to know.

“Ah!” Ventus jerked his hand back, sending the Unversed darting for the safety of the helmet.

He froze. Something had just happened. He looked at his finger. The blood had been smudged. His eyes fell to the creature, now cautiously peeking its head out.

Ventus lowered his hand again, eyes locked on the Unversed.

It crept toward him once more, and this time Ventus didn’t let his eyes stray as it neared his finger again. As again, it sniffed his wound… before opening its mouth to reveal a red tongue.

This time, when the tongue flicked out to meet his skin, he could process the sensation.

The _sensation._

It was what fire looked like when it ignited dry brush. Like the lightning that clouds carried across the sky.

It was _feeling,_ being conducted across his skin to settle into his chest where it sparked and leapt like a whirlwind.

But it wouldn’t move from his finger. He could only feel— _feel_ —the width of the wound.

It seemed impossible, unthinkable, but he managed to take his hand away from the Unversed, long enough to latch the edge of his glove in his teeth, and pull it off.

When he returned his hand to the bed, the Unversed licked it again.

Then again.

And again.

Once the blood was gone, it moved onto his palm, and he wrapped his fingers around it like it was the last shadow left in all the worlds.

All sensation had been scorched away beneath the light that burned inside him. He could feel nothing—not emotion, nor pain—but the Unversed lit his seared senses with each brush of contact.

All too soon, the Unversed tired, eyes blinking sleepily as it nuzzled against his skin. Ventus picked it up reverently—with both hands, for it had become the size of a rat—pushed the broken helmet to the edge of the bed, and slowly laid himself down, form curled around the Unversed. With his back towards the wall and helmet, he took in the sparse, pitiful emptiness of his room, and he felt.

He felt sorry for himself.

For the first time, he dreamt.

He was a child, in a city of cobblestone. Something was crying, somewhere he couldn’t see. It mewled mournfully from a darkness beyond his reach, but his hand was in someone else’s, and they were pulling him away.

They were speaking to him, urging him to keep moving, but he weighed his feet down, refusing to move until his grip on the stones began to slide.

Didn’t they hear it crying?

Ventus’ cheeks were cold when he woke, and there was a strange and new twisting inside his chest.

His hands no longer held the Unversed, but the dark stain sunk in across the front of his suit painted a picture of where it had gone. Returned to.

He had stolen it, and now he couldn’t give it back. The thoughts seemed to latch in his mind alongside his chest, like burs that pricked his eyes.

Ventus looked to his hand, now healed over, and traced gloved fingers along it, trying to relive the feeling the Unversed had given him.

He needed another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was like "eh idk if I have any sort of direction or trajectory for roleswap beyond what I wrote" but then I was like "you fool. ven takes care of rat"
> 
> Everyone deserves to know the exhilaration of a rat licking their hand v-v
> 
> I was thinking of princess tutu while I wrote this part—how the prince loses his emotions and only gets them back one by one, and that he’s only capable of the ones he’s been given. Ventus gets pity.  
> 
> 
> Thank you for all the support!! This is really fun to write, so I'm marking it as unfinished, but I'm not sure what any sort of schedule might look like.
> 
> In the meantime, I'm on twitter at [toppiegames!](https://twitter.com/toppiegames)
> 
> Fanart... (of the first chapter if you haven't seen)  
> [Art by kipskiff](https://twitter.com/kipskiff/status/1213609232068513792)  
> [And then some by me!](https://twitter.com/toppiegames/status/1303210888640360448)


	3. Sorrow

Vanitas’ heart was a tangled ball of twine, emotions twisted and tied together into whatever shape was most fitting to keep them from leaving his chest. Since he’d come here to the Land of Departure, he’d learned to take note and stock of each thread that kept him bound here beneath Eraqus’ pitying gaze.

One was missing.

A pressure no heavier than the tread of a mouse had lifted from his heart, and inexplicably ceased to be.

All the Unversed he created would disappear on their own, eventually, but it was because he was managing to coax the darkness that formed them back into his own cyclic heart to be tied down again, woven in until they couldn’t struggle free.

And one was missing.

It should have left him feeling emptier, maybe, but it didn’t.

He’d learned so much about the way his heart functioned, but nothing about _what_ made it function, or how it had become so damaged. He never expected Eraqus to tell him anything useful, but even nudging Terra and Aqua hadn’t yielded any answers. Apparently, Master Xehanort hadn’t been at all forthcoming about what had happened.

As much as he wanted to dwell on it, dwelling was a luxury he didn’t have. If he let himself stew too long about anything, all it did was dredge up complicated emotions that became complicated Unversed that required complicated excuses to explain to the others. Terra and Aqua had sometimes covered for him before, hiding Unversed in chests or altering the tracking records, but lately their concern for his safety had loosened their lips around Eraqus.

It had been about a week since the sentinels had been destroyed, and the others were getting tired. For all their training, even the three of them couldn’t sustain the same level of security that the sentinels had provided, and something dark in Vanitas heart simmered with spiteful pride. For all Eraqus’ derision towards the creatures, he’d needed them more than he would ever admit. Without them, he’d had to use his own magic to cast a stronger barrier around the grounds, and Vanitas could tell how much it drained him.

Eraqus had eventually let him leave his room, but only to resume training. Even Vanitas’ walks around the edges of the too-small Land of Departure were cancelled until further notice—until the creature calling itself Ventus had been caught.

Eraqus and Terra and Aqua continued to call him “it”. Vanitas wasn’t entirely sure if they even believed that Ventus wasn’t just a new type of Unversed that Vanitas had somehow created. Looking up at the ceiling his darkened bedroom, Vanitas wasn’t entirely sure of it either. Ventus had known exactly where to find him, had known _him._ And though he hadn’t killed the Unversed he’d stolen, he’d done something to stop it from returning to the heart it belonged to. It had left Vanitas’ heart feeling lighter and a little less complicated, like one more breath he didn’t have to hold. It wasn't enough to unwind him, or plug up the fissures through his heart, but it was a relief all the same.

All this time alone in his room had kept his mind looping back to that pale eye beneath Ventus’ helmet, the starved voice inside its shell, trying to decide if he should be scared, or thankful.

Giving up on sleep, Vanitas sat up to open his window, trying not to let it creak. The wood was still new—they’d had to build a new frame with a stronger lock after Ventus had destroyed the other one—and if the others discovered that Vanitas had broken the new lock then he’d never hear the end of it from Eraqus, always going on about how reckless he was.

But if his reckless behavior had ever endangered those who cared for him, it had always been because he’d had no other choice. More and more, he wanted a choice.

The fresh night air hit his cheeks, smelling like distant worlds and freedom, and as he breathed in deep, one of the knots in his chest reached up to tighten around his throat.

Why did Terra and Aqua get to travel to worlds beyond, while he was left behind to be drowned by his own emotions? How long would it be before they outgrew him, leaving him for good before he was strong enough to join them?

Too late, he realized he’d let himself feel too much. Vanitas cursed as sadness pooled in the pit of his chest, a dragging weight that threatened to pull him into dark and writhing depths. Sadness was not as cold as fear, but it stole the warmth from his body, making everything feel dulled and numb.

He leaned forward to let darkness pour from his eyes and onto the bedspread, hoping the Unversed wouldn’t be big enough to stain the record he was trying so hard to keep clean for Eraqus. As the Unversed took the form of a Flood, Vanitas tried not to let his rising dread create another.

The new Flood stared up at him blankly, like it was waiting for some sort of instruction, but all Vanitas was too tired to think of anything.

He flopped back onto the bed, let the Flood crawl and curl up on top of him, and tried to clear his thoughts enough to sleep.

Before long, he was reminded why the lock had been a good idea.

In a flash of light, the one who had been haunting his thoughts and a few of his dreams appeared on the open sill, perched like a snow-white cat. With his helmet now entirely gone, his cropped hair looked like wheat fields scorched into white ash, framing gaunt skin that belonged to a ghost. As their eyes met, like they had before, Vanitas felt a twinge in his chest as fear balanced itself against pity once more, and his throat closed like he was in a dream, unable to scream.

Ventus, meanwhile, seemed to have a goal different from last time. Instead of summoning his Keyblade, his eyes fell upon the Unversed, and his arms lashed out to grab it. For some reason, one hand was ungloved, and as Ventus’ skin made contact with the creature, he hesitated just long enough for Vanitas to get a hand around his arm.

There was a screech through his bones as Ventus teleported the three of them, this time to one of the lamplit grassy platforms near the main castle structure. Ventus took Vanitas’ disorientation as an opportunity to plant a foot in his chest and shove him to the ground, holding fast onto his prize. The Flood was trapped in the crook of his elbow, struggling like a displeased pet.

Vanitas scrambled to right himself, and as he summoned his Keyblade, Ventus’ flashed out to match it, pale eyes holding his as tightly as he held the Flood. The two of them remained still and silent, mirrors of each other while the Unversed continued to squirm.

Without moving, Vanitas breathed as deeply as he dared, using each exhale to smooth down the ripples of fear pooling coldly in his chest, then began piling every rational thought he could find on top of them..

Ventus hadn’t killed the first Unversed he’d taken.

Ventus hadn’t hurt either of them tonight.

Something more was different, too. Vanitas could feel nothing but discomfort coming from the Flood, which meant that Ventus wasn’t even holding it tightly enough to cause it pain. The grey eye Vanitas had seen through the broken helmet had been cold enough to kill, but now, there was a crack behind his unflinching gaze, some new force holding him back.

There was one more thing, he noticed. A small darkened smear across the front of Ventus’ suit, a dull shadow that hadn’t been there before.

_I want to feel._

Vanitas began to realize what Ventus really had come for—both tonight, and a week ago. Soon the Flood slowed its movements, stilling in Ventus’ arm.

Vanitas watched on as Ventus deliberately readjusted his grip on the creature so that his ungloved hand was touching it. As Ventus' palm made contact, his expression went distant, eyes going out of focus, and Vanitas felt one of the knots inside him slacken.

“Give it back,” he said suddenly, cutting into Ventus’ stupor.

“No.” Ventus’ dull eyes sparked, and he twisted his wrist, spinning the glass-sharp edge of his backhanded keyblade up underneath the Flood’s chin. “I want it.”

The petulant nature of the words made it easier for Vanitas to tamp down the rising fear that Ventus would follow through with his threat. “You don’t want that one.”

Ventus didn’t seem to anticipate this answer, but he still didn’t lower his Keyblade. His opposite hand clutched the side of the Flood’s head as something behind his eyes started to writhe.

“All that one has inside it is sadness,” Vanitas said. “Nothing good.” He wasn’t looking forward to taking it back, but it didn’t seem fair to give to someone else.

“I want it,” Ventus said again, and Vanitas realized what the writhing was. Ventus’ eyes had begun to fill with tears, which finally breached to streak down his cheeks like untangled silver threads.

“I want it.” This time, his voice cracked, split open with a new emotion that buckled his knees. Both Keyblades were banished as Ventus curled forward, and Vanitas, unthinking, moved to catch him.

Even burdened by the sadness flowing from the Unversed, Ventus’ reflexes remained sharp, and he used his empty hand to catch Vanitas’ shoulder and shove him harshly away. He fell backwards, catching himself on his elbows.

The next noise Ventus made was a gasping sob that sent a thick, braided cord of sorrow in Vanitas’ chest unraveling, stringing itself out of his heart and into someone else’s. He tried to hold onto the sadness, tried to make it something else, but it was already too late.

When the Flood dissipated, its journey complete, Ventus curled in on himself tighter. He cried like Vanitas cried—silently, until he would pause to take a trembling breath in. Vanitas watched him like he might watch himself in a dream, and though the sorrow had left him, there was more growing to take its place.

“I don’t want to be like this,” Ventus breathed, voice muffled by his knees. “I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to be alone.”

Each word rang in him like a violin bow being drawn across a string, stirring something new in Vanitas’ heart. For him, even with Terra and Aqua’s support, even with the constant presence of the Unversed, he still felt alone in this place. There was a mawing hole in him that wanted more, that yearned for something he couldn’t articulate. He wanted freedom—true freedom, and Ventus did too.

Vanitas’ brow furrowed. “Where do you have to go back to?”

Ventus’ head shot up, reddened eyes swiveling on Vanitas like they’d entirely forgotten he was there, and it took everything in him not to scramble backwards and resummon his Keyblade.

“He intends us to rend each other apart,” Ventus said shakily, though his tears seemed to be subsiding.

“Who?”

“But it was him who rended us first,” Ventus went on, his attention drifting away towards the edge of the world, where he stared out at the horizon.

Vanitas shook his head, not understanding. “What are you talking about? Who… Who made you like this?”

Ventus’ eyes returned to him then, wet and red and almost glowing. “You are ignorant, but not guiltless.”

A hand flashed out to connect with Vanitas’ ribs, and his back connected hard with the ground.

“Piece by piece, I will take what is mine.” Ventus’ knee found his stomach as he reached a bare hand out towards Vanitas’ throat.

“Vanitas!” Eraqus’ voice barked from somewhere across the green, and Ventus’ hand stopped.

“Master Eraqus!” Vanitas cried, cursing how easily the words rose to his mouth as he struggled beneath Ventus. Even as he had begun to quantify how much he resented Eraqus, he still wasn’t strong enough to defend himself. “Help!”

From above him, Vanitas watched Ventus’ eyes narrow, as if calculating how he would fare against an unfettered Keyblade Master. In the next moment, Ventus was standing, stark and ghoulish like a skeleton against the dim sky. He looked down on Vanitas witheringly.

“I will always find you.”

Then he was gone in a flash of light, just before Eraqus’ brutal Blizzaga spell could connect with his bleached white silhouette.

It didn’t matter what he said, how he pled. Vanitas was moved to a room in the inner section of the castle—a windowless one with walls that rose around him like the sides of a white box growing smaller and smaller, and a door that locked from the outside. The Unversed flowed from him in a languid stream he lacked the will to stem, some of them too large to form inside the room. They leaked out underneath the crack beneath the door, rising in the hall beyond where the others stood ready to freeze them into a gallery of ice sculptures.

Soon, they got their sentinels back.

And after a while, Vanitas began to turn to Ventus’ threat for comfort.

_I will always find you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This is a good song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo2kXlimCYs)
> 
> vanitas holding table scraps of emotions: I mean I was gonna throw them away but  
> ventus: [snatches them and scuttles back under a rock to gnaw on the bones]  
> vanitas: hm. maybe he could be my friend
> 
> Also this chapter was me haggardly trying not to mix up ventus & vantias' names and not writing "venitas" by mistake


	4. Fear

Ventus crouched on the windowsill, letting his bare fingers trace the rough grain of the wood they’d used to repair the frame. It prickled back at him like the tiny sparks left by metal dragged against stone, and he moved his hand again to compare it to the smooth wood of the sill itself.

Sensation had returned to one of his hands, creeping like frostbite along the fissure of the wound the Unversed had licked. Touch became enthralling and consuming, and he’d been using his hand to rediscover everything he knew, matching the way things looked to the way his skin would ignite when he touched them.

Through the glass of the window Ventus’ eyes locked with the red eyes of a small Unversed that had emerged from the darkness, and as they did, something in his chest let out a screeching keen, a desperate need for whatever the small creature held inside it.

He reached to rip off the window latch that had been screwed into the center of the frame, but the cold metal digging hard into his bare fingers proved too distracting, so he used the hand still untouched by sensation to pry the latch off.

When this hand became difficult to move, he summoned his Keyblade to his palm, and dug the sharp end under the latch to pry it free. The daggers of its teeth split the wood easily enough, and the window sprang open.

The Unversed—one that looked like a rabbit—sat like frozen prey as Ventus stepped onto Vanitas’ empty bed. He banished the Keyblade to free both his hands, knelt down to brace himself, then pressed his ungloved palm against the Unversed’s forehead.

Emotion hit his chest like a squall, ripping through his ribs, and he unwillingly let out a whimper. A biting gale sent him tumbling down into dark, clammy depths that echoed with screams made in Vanitas’ voice, and his own.

Fear was nosing coldly through his muscles, freezing him over like it had the rabbit, and he was ill-equipped to fight it. The threads of rational thought that governed his actions in place of emotion became icy and brittle with paranoia.

Outside the door, footsteps on stone. The sound kicked his body into a flurry of confusion that ended with him swaddled in darkness beneath Vanitas’ bedsheets.

He lay there, balled up and shivering without cold, and waited.

The door opened. Heavy-treading feet stepped inside, then stopped. Ventus was unaccustomed to his own heartbeat—its murmur usually too weak to perceive—but now it rose to thud against the insides of his ears like a swallowed animal trying to escape a stomach.

The sheets were torn away from him, ripping his world back into cold, soft moonlight. Ventus stared up at the brown-haired young man—Terra—whose eyes blinked at him with bewilderment, mouth slightly open.

“You’re—you’re just a kid.”

Something childish had clamped itself around Ventus’ heart, and he couldn’t will his muscles to move. It was taking everything in him just to keep his throat from letting more pitiful noises escape it.

Terra’s eyes searched him as he lay prone, then he looked back towards the door to check that the threshold was still empty and dark. Once he verified that it was, Terra slowly lowered himself to crouch at the bedside.

“Hey—I’m not going to hurt you,” Terra said in a whisper, which only served to unlock Ventus’ muscles and send him scrambling backwards in the bed until his back hit the edge of the windowsill. His lungs strained from overuse, which sent his head floating and left no breath for any sort of response.

Terra’s face twisted with confusion, and, bafflingly, he spoke again. “What’s wrong? Hey. It’s okay.” Gingerly, Terra pulled the bedsheets back over him, as if he might actually be cold.

Ventus swallowed hard, and managed to gaspingly stifle the cadence of his breathing back to normality.

“Did someone send you here?”

Ventus’ neck muscles jerked, sending his head shaking violently back and forth.

“You came here on your own.”

A stiff nod. The fear squirming inside him was making him pliable beneath the press of Terra’s voice, and he had to get out—he had to get away—but nothing was listening to him.

Fear was still working its slow creep through his veins, threading his thoughts with visions of Terra and the other Keyblade wielders attacking him three to one, freezing him solid and shattering him to pieces. Of Xehanort finding out he’d come here again. Of being like this, forever. It was all compounding to paralyze him.

“So what are you doing here?”

Ventus looked searchingly for the rabbit Unversed he had been holding, but there was nothing left of it but the dregs of its shadow stained across the chest of his suit.

More creeping glacier moments passed between them, but then the bed sank as Terra sat down beside him. Ventus’ eyes fell to the young man’s wringing hands as they clenched and unclenched in seeming deliberation. Likely deciding whether to kill Ventus himself, or go get the others to help.

“Master Eraqus—” Ventus nearly jumped out of his suit, but Terra’s weight on the bedspread kept the covers tangled across his chest like chains he couldn’t strain free of. Terra was going to tie him up in bedsheets and then drop him at his Master’s feet and— “No—no, he’s not here, he’s not here—he won’t hurt you!” Terra whispered hurriedly.

Ventus paused his thrashing.

“I won’t hurt you.”

He looked at Terra, into honest eyes the blue of shadows cast by storm clouds on an ocean, and Ventus recognized the pity they held now that he’d known it for himself.

“Master Eraqus thinks you’ve come to steal or… kill Van for what he is. That you’re here to take advantage of what’s inside him.” Terra’s eyes deflected towards the wall. “He told us to attack you on sight.”

“Wh…” Ventus found that his lips could move again. “Why haven’t you?”

Terra’s fist balled atop the bedspread. “Because… I don’t think he’s right.” His voice fell quiet. “I don’t think what he’s doing is right.

“Master Eraqus locked him up so that no one can hurt him, but it’s only making Van hurt himself,” Terra said. “He’s creating more Unversed than we can manage.” Ventus knew that much. Now that he’d had a taste of the Unversed, he could hear their calls and cries, and the fresh pity in his heart hadn’t let him ignore them. He was so close now. Ventus made another, more lucid effort to struggle out of the bedsheets.

“What do you want with Van?” Terra asked, weight like a padlock beside him, honest eyes boring holes into his skull.

“I need him.” The words came out with more intonation than he’d expected.

“What do you need him for?”

“What do _you_ need him for?” Ventus shot back, and Terra’s expression became wounded.

“He’s our responsibility!” Terra said, too loud. “He’s our friend,” he added quietly.

“Then let him out,” Ventus said.

Terra lowered his head into his hands. “Master Eraqus locked the door with his Keyblade. This castle only listens to him.”

Ventus turned his head, looking up at the same ceiling Vanitas had looked at. The ceiling he could look at no longer.

Budding thoughts were cut short as a lighter tread on stone sounded outside the door, and fear rushed back over him like a sudden frost. Terra threw the covers over Ventus’ head, and stood.

The young woman, Aqua, stopped at the threshold.

“Oh! Terra.” She let out a breath, sounding relieved. “What are you doing in here?”

“I…” Terra began, and then sighed. “…When is the Master going to let Van come back out?”

“Oh, Terra… You heard what Master Eraqus said: we can’t allow him to come under outside influences. Not when he’s made so much progress.”

“Aqua, do you really think this is helping him? Do you think that it will just stop?”

“It… it has to eventually, doesn’t it? Eventually he’ll have released them all.”

“And what’ll be left of him then?”

The words were pelting Ventus’ heart like hail, sending his chest seizing with the threat of sobs. He clenched his teeth to prevent any from escaping.

“…We’ll talk to Master Eraqus again in the morning,” she finally said. “All right?”

“What are we supposed to do if he says no?” Terra asked. “What if… Ventus finds him anyway?” A sharp pang of terror rang through Ventus at the sound of his name.

“Don’t say that, Terra.”

“Van’s pretty convinced Ventus can help him.”

“Terra,” Aqua said severely. “Master Eraqus found it trying to choke Van.”

“Van said he didn’t get hurt,” Terra mumbled, but he was backing down.

“Terra,” Aqua said again. “I don’t want to do this right now. In the morning, we’ll talk to Master Eraqus, and do what we can after that.”

“Fine.”

They stood in stalemate a few breaths longer, and then Aqua said, “Close the window.” before her footsteps retreated.

Once she was gone, Terra walked towards the door, and then spoke, as if to himself. “Ventus…”

In the darkness beneath the blankets, Ventus’ ears strained.

“If he gets hurt,” Terra whispered. “You’ll pay for it ten fold.” Then the door to the room closed softly, and Ventus was alone again.

He didn’t know how long he waited, but eventually his body was his own again, and he freed himself easily from the bed. Once he was standing on the floor, he caught sight of the pale shadow his light cast below his feet. Though he didn’t relish being swaddled in fabric any longer than he already had, he pulled the dark bedsheets off the bed and draped them around himself to cloak the light he emitted.

Skittering Floods scattered from his feet as he walked the dark halls of the castle, but he couldn’t let himself be distracted from a much larger prize.

Ventus reached the open, vaulted hall made claustrophobic by a crowd of Unversed that stood clustered like a menagerie of statues in storage. Some had heads that brushed the ceiling, while others were scattered like shrubs at his knees. The room was kept as cold as fear to keep them frozen, contained.

The maw of Ventus’ hunger and desire began to open wide, but he bated it just a little longer. He wove his way through the tangle of monsters to the door that lay at the end of the hall—no adornment but a large keyhole set in its center. The stones at its base had been stained black, and tendrils of shadow lay limply tangled around its edges like vines fed by ink.

As Ventus neared the door, the low hum in his heart that drew him towards Vanitas rose to a loud crackling that drowned out thought like static. He didn’t want his pieces. He wanted the whole. “Vanitas,” came hissing through his teeth.

The blanket he’d been holding around himself dropped, and the Keyblade flashed into his grip. He spun it to face the lock upon the great door, but the keyhole sat inert, like a void in the dark. Ventus drove the Keyblade physically forward, grinding its teeth into the open hole, but still it did not respond. He dug it into the crack between the door and frame, aiming to pry it open like he had the window.

“Ventus?” came a hoarse voice from inside. _“Ventus?”_

The sound of that voice only served to make his prying more desperate.

“Stop!” Vanitas hissed from the other side of the door. “Stop that—they’ll hear you!” Fear swerved to blindside Ventus once more. He stopped.

“This door won’t open to anyone but Eraqus,” Vanitas went on. “You have to leave, or he’ll catch you.”

Ventus’ Keyblade vanished, and he dragged his fingers roughly, impotently down the front of the door. “No,” he said, pressing his head against the barrier between half of him and the rest of him. “I can’t leave. I can’t leave.”

There was a soft thud as Vanitas rested his head on the opposite side of the door. “You should go. I don’t have anything to give you but despair.”

The static inside Ventus’ mind parted slightly, and he rolled his head sideways to look at the macabre collection of Unversed.

If he couldn’t get to Vanitas, they would have to do for now.

He turned from the door.

“Ventus?”

His Keyblade reappeared, and he cast a powerful Aeroga through the hall, toppling the large Unversed and heaping the smaller ones around their fallen bodies.

“No!”

Ventus brought his empty hand down on the nearest frozen Unversed, willing its emotion to enter him by force. It began to unspool sluggishly into icy tendrils of darkness, and when those tendrils touched the next nearest Unversed, they sent it unwinding too. A massive chain reaction began in slow motion as Ventus bade everything into his starving heart.

“Ventus… Ventus?!” Fists thumped on the other side of the door to match his rising pulse. “Stop! It doesn’t have to be like this!”

Dulled emotions were pulled into him like a drunken river, and he stumbled down, heart and head spinning. Once the rush had begun, he couldn’t stop it, and he lay there until it was over—until the last streaks of darkness across the hall had been drawn inside him. Winter seas of emotion were starting to churn beneath the warmth of a new heart, and Ventus knew he didn’t have much time.

But he couldn’t teleport through barriers. His dizzy eyes found a window set in near the ceiling, and he threw a strike raid to shatter it. Ignoring further screams from Vanitas, he shifted himself through light to reach the hole to the roof. Something in him stuttered just before he made it outside, but he managed to catch his hands on the edge of the broken window. There was no time to consider what new pain his changing body could bring him, so he hauled himself back out into the night.

Driven by an animal need to escape, consciousness left him briefly, and then he was somewhere else. He was in the place Xehanort called the Keyblade Graveyard—where he’d first been severed—and his time was up.

The torrent of thawed emotion finally crested in him, and breached. A buildup of Unversed across a wretched month of confinement rushed through his every vein and pore, felling him into the dirt where he writhed and wailed.

The Graveyard could withstand the screams—it had been inoculated to them a long time ago.

As he screamed, Ventus drowned, choked by endless emotion, lungs filling not with air but tears and rage and despair. He vomited roiling black rage onto the dusty dirt, but there was still too much inside him to process or bear. The world he’d once bleached became black as pitch, and his awareness fell to welcoming and unfamiliar darkness.

A boot nudged him awake. As soon as Ventus’ eyes opened to see Xehanort’s face leering above him, a hot hatred poured into his heart—furious that it had been made to wait until Ventus could feel it. But before the hatred could rise to tear out the old man’s throat, fear in equal measure rose to temper it.

Xehanort was holding a catlike Unversed—black with strange streaks of light across its surface like stripes. He brandished it above Ventus like a trophy.

Ventus recognized it as the rage he’d thrown up, just before Xehanort crushed it within his grip.

Ventus cried out as the Unversed was dispatched. Pain was not yet familiar to him, and it was even more alien coming from the Unversed.

But then the pain passed, warmed away by the rage that returned to bubble inside him. He coughed weakly, but could purge nothing more. Xehanort’s smirk came, and then went, and he folded his arms crisply behind his back once more.

“Come, boy. There’s work to be done.”

Some day, he wouldn’t.

Today, he did.

And through the days to come, Ventus turned over Vanitas’ words in his mind until they became a promise.

_It doesn’t have to be like this._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tfw a feral cat breaks into your house, gets tangled in your bedsheets, knocks over all your stuff, then escapes through an open window and starts screaming down the street
> 
> Also I’m imagining Vanitas having heavy black bedsheets because once the Unversed you create stain your white bedsheets there’s no point in having any color but black
> 
> I think this is pretty much a point where the story moves into an AU version of Birth by Sleep, so rather than vaulting into a BBS rewrite I’m going to mark this fic as complete. If I do add more, it might be like, a BBS scene here or there rewritten for this canon, so feel free to remain subscribed in case I do!
> 
> This is how I see alternate BBS kicking off:  
> Vanitas is released from the room because he and Terra (who would maybe clean up the evidence of Ventus) manage to convince Eraqus that Vanitas pulled everything back into himself—that he is ready to resume his training.  
> After Terra and Aqua’s Masters exam (which Terra fails due to doubt in his teacher rather than temptations of darkness), Eraqus sends Terra and Aqua on a search and destroy mission to get rid of Ventus, who is still at large. Vanitas escapes to follow them (maybe his fighting style incorporates Unversed ;-;), and BBS begins in much the same way, with Ventus being able to conjure Unversed that are different from Vanitas’.
> 
> Until I maybe circle back around to this, please feel free to write or explore more in this AU—I'd love to see it!
> 
> Thanks so much for reading and take care! I'm on twitter at [toppiegames](https://twitter.com/toppiegames) if you ever want to yell about this.


End file.
